Facebook and MySpace Back New York Sex Offender Law

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January 30, 2008

Facebook and MySpace Back New York Sex Offender Law

Facebook and MySpace have announced that they're on board with a new bill in the New York state legislature:

"The initiative behind the bill is called the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act or E-Stop. The legislation restricts certain sex offenders' (high risk Level 3 offenders defined as those offenders with a 'high risk to commit another sex crime') use of the Internet, updating Megan's Law 'for the Internet age.'

"E-Stop would require sex offenders to register any and all email accounts and Internet identifiers used in instant messaging, chatting and other forms of Internet communication and social networking with the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services just as they would register their home addresses. If the said offender creates an email address and doesn't tell the authorities with 10 days of its creation, he or she is violating the law, Mr. Cuomo said, and could be hit with a violation of their parole or probation.

"The bill also gives the division of criminal justice services to pass along the email addresses and identifiers of some sex offenders to the networking sites (so far MySpace and Facebook have committed to working with New York) so that they can remove any sex offenders that have registered their emails with the sites. MySpace and Facebook officials support the bill and said that they would notify law enforcement of any sex offenders they catch using their site's services."

As the NYT reporter-blogger notes, one of the assemblymen behind the new bill expressed concern about how familiar parents are with MySpace and "Spacebook."

Indeed.

It looks like e-mail registration is a core provision in the bill, which also takes me back to July, when I noted an internetnews.com story quoting someone close to the issue who "told internetnews.com that this won’t be solved until states pass laws forcing predators to register their e-mail addresses the same way they have to register street addresses."

I have no idea how they think they're going to enforce this, or why they think someone enough in the grip of a sexual compulsion to go out looking for victims on the Internet will be deterred by fear that they'll get violated back into jail if they're somehow caught with an unreported e-mail address.

And more importantly, there's an almost willful blindness present in legislation like this, considering the fact that the vast preponderance of child sexual abuse, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of known cases, is initiated by people the child knows and trusts.

But a lot of this stuff got rolling last summer, in a drastically different political environment. Back then, I linked to an InformationWeek article that dug up a Texas Republican who was trying to, somehow, turn Internet predation into a wedge issue, trying to accuse Democrats of neglecting the issue. Whenever this kind of thing comes up, politicians can go two ways: They can blow off the demagogues and hope the issue goes away or doesn't really emerge in the public consciousness, or they can decide to just roll with it because, hey, what's the harm?

"Internet predators" are an abstraction that's easy to hate and "fight."

The eventual side effect of laws like this one will be further entrenchment of the surveillance state, because the politicians slapping each other on the back over New York's bill are asking the same question I did: How on Earth are they going to catch sex offenders registering on social networking sites with unreported e-mail addresses? At the moment, they really can't. So next up they'll be asking why AT&T can propose monitoring the Internet to block the unsanctioned transmission of copyrighted material but can't monitor the flow of perv traffic on Gmail.

(Link)

Previously: